Dartmoor National Park Authority

Evidence for the immediate post Roman period occupation comes from several large memorial stones, located particularly on the north and west side of the moor, which commemorate tribal leaders or princes, they date to the 5th to 7th century.

Towards the end of the 1st millennium AD, i.e. 9th and 10th centuries, an improvement in the climate allowed for re-occupation of the moor following abandonment in prehistoric times. One of the earliest known settlements is Lydford, on the west side of the moor, founded by the Kings of Wessex as a defensive site, or burh, in the late 9th century. From the late 10th to the mid 11th century, coins were minted here.

Anglo Saxon Silver Pennies Minted at Lydford (10th - 11th century)

Much of the re-colonisation of Dartmoor seems to have occurred in the period following the Norman Conquest (AD1066). Stone-built rectangular houses, dating to around AD1250 have been excavated. These were classic longhouses – long buildings with opposing entrances and aligned downslope which were home to both humans and animals, with outbuildings and paddocks close by. Associated with these are medieval field systems where often the boundary between the farmed land and the open moor was marked by corn ditches; a vertical faced stone wall with a ditch facing out on to the open moorland, and a sloping bank on the farmland side. This deterred the King’s deer from entering the farmland but if they did so they could escape out again with comparative ease. Corn ditches continued to be used as a distinctive Dartmoor form of boundary, often revealing the attempts and failures to enclose the higher slopes of moorland.

Many of those farms that had been created on the higher contours were abandoned toward the end of the 14th century. A combination of a worsening climate from the 1300s had meant crops were no longer ripening in the fields, animals which had become far more prone to disease and the Black Death are all thought to have contributed to this abandonment. This exit from the higher slopes was to add yet another layer to the palimpsest.

This was not total abandonment and indeed the tradition of building longhouses was to continue for another four centuries and fine occupied examples can still be seen today.

Dartmoor’s later medieval prosperity was due to both the working of tin and sheep farming, with wool becoming an increasingly important part of the economy. Much of the land where sheep were grazed was owned by the three great medieval abbeys situated around the fringe of the Moor, Tavistock, Buckfast and Buckland .

Rabbits too played an important economic role in later medieval period when they were farmed commercially on Dartmoor for both their meat and fur. These warren farms have left their own archaeological record in the form of pillow mounds, cigar-shaped earth mounds where rabbits were encouraged to live and remain in the warren; stone built vermin traps were built to catch their natural predators and boundary stones marking out the warren bounds.